After more than two decades, women between ages 20 and 39 are seeing a slight increase in the rates of breast cancer mortality.
The two decade-plus trend of declining death rates from breast cancer is at an end for women under age 40, prompting experts to call for greater awareness of and more research into the reasons behind this change.
From 1989 to 2017, statistics from the National Center for Health Statistics showed mortality rates from breast cancer among women of all ages declined steeply by 40 percent, largely due to an increase in screening mammography use. But, now, a retrospective analysis, published Feb. 9 in Radiology, shows a slight death-rate increase – 0.5 percent annually – in women ages 20 to 39 between 2010 and 2017.
“It’s clear that mortality rates in women under 40 are no longer decreasing,” said lead study author R. Edward Hendrick, Ph.D., clinical professor of radiology from the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “I estimate that in two-to-three years, the mortality rate will be increasing significantly in these women.”
Among women in each age decade from ages 40 and 79, mortality rates from 2010 to 2017 dropped between 1.2 percent to 2.2 percent. But, the 0.5 percent increase in women between ages 20 and 39 pushed the team to investigate further.
Digging into Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program data, the team that included researchers from Michigan Medicine and Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in Texas, found the metastatic breast cancer incidence rate increase mainly affected white women and that it grew by more than 4 percent annually since 2000 for women in the 20-to-39 age group – a much higher increase than the 1.2 percent rise among women over 40 since 2002. Mortality rates for African American, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic women ages 20 to 39 continued to decline significantly from 1990 to 2017, they said.
Read the full article here: https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/breast-cancer-mortality-rates-no-longer-falling-for-younger-women
